Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, the greatest mystic poet the world has produced, was born in Balkh in 1207 A.D. and his father, Shaikh Bahauddin Balkhi was also an acknowledged scholar in the Islamic world. The great change in the life of Maulana Rumi came when he met the saint, Shams Tabrez, a great mystic of his time. Maulana Rumi then rose to great spiritual heights and celebrated saints like Bu Ali Shah Qalander and Shaikh Shahabuddin Suhrawardy received spiritual guidance from him. Maulana Rumi left behind two works on which his fame rests. His Diwan and his immortal Mathnawi. The Diwan mostly contains mystical Lyrics which are replete with sincerity, sublimity and deep emotionalism. His immortal Mathnawi is undoubtedly the most popular book in the Persian language. It has been translated into several languages of the East and the West and has given him a distinguished place among the few immortal poets of the world. According to the Maulana himself the Mathnawi contains' the roots of religion and the discoveries of the mystery of nature and divine knowledge'. Maulana Rumi died in 1273 A.D. and was laid to rest at Konya (Turkey).
Arabic, and Hindustani, but only the first two of the six their entirety to European readers, though a number of extracts from Books III-VI are translated in E. H. Whinfield's useful abridgment. While it may seem surprising that a work so celebrated, and one which reflects (however darkly at times) so much of the highest as well as the lowest in the life and thought of the Mohammedan world in the later Middle Ages, should still remain imperfectly known to Western students, I think that this gap in our knowledge can at least be excused. Judged by modern standards, the Mathnawi is a very long poem: it contains almost as many verses as the Iliad and Odyssey together and about twice as many as the Divina Commedia; and these comparisons make it appear shorter than it actually is, since every verse of the Mathnawi has twenty-two syllables, whereas the hexameter may vary from thirteen to seventeen, and the terzarima, like the Spenserian stanza, admits only ten or eleven in each verse, so that the Mathnawi with 25,700 verses is in reality a far more extensive work than the Faerie Queen with 33,500. On the other hand, it is easily surpassed in length by several Persian poems; and the fact that the Shahnama has been translated from beginning to end into English, French, and Italian answers the question asked by Georg Rosen-"Who would care to devote a considerable part of his lifetime to translating thirty or forty thousand Persian distichs of unequal poetical worth?" The size of the Mathnawi is not the chief or the worst obstacle by which its translator is confronted.
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